Ashes in the Sky
by Riptide Monzarc
Summary: After the culmination of Athadra's most audacious plan, others are left to pick up the pieces, and see her to her final resting place. Companion piece to An Accounting of the Inquisition.


There was no sign of the battle around them, so deeply had they ranged into the wilderness. The forest was a deep green, cool and dark at the end of the day, trees verdant and soaking in every drop of sunlight they could hope to reach and leaving but little to hit upon the ground. All except for one tree, its trunk grey and dappled, its gnarled boughs near to leafless, allowing the evening sun's rays to limn the loamy soil about the kinked veinwork of its roots.

"This will serve," Solas allowed, his voice as ethereal as ever despite the exhaustion he must be feeling after the day's climactic battle. "The tree is near to dying, and its roots will not draw the taint to spread with the next spring." Even then, Cullen was supervising the controlled burn of the battlefield, presented with the task of reducing the corpse of the last Old God to ash before the army could hope to decamp. But such concerns were beyond the party who'd carried on, just then.

Cassandra surveyed the site in silence for a span of moments. "We aren't likely to do any better," she judged. "I also believe this spot will serve as good as any. Do you agree?"

She addressed Suredat-an, who had carried her burden for more than the hour it had taken the party to leave the battlefield behind. "Yes," the Herald supplied, as taciturn as usual…though none among them had spoken a word on the march, until Solas had broken their stride along with their silence.

"It looks peaceful," Bethany supplied, from Suredat-an's left. "I…" Her voice hitched, and she swallowed thickly, looking down and away. "I believe it will do."

"Then it's settled," Leliana pronounced, from the Herald's right. Her voice held a subtle timbre of emotion which her long career in subterfuge had given her ample practice in suppressing, but the occasion proved too sombre for even her considerable talents. "We shall lay her here."

Cassandra produced a trowel she'd procured just before their silent march, when it was clear it would be needed, and she approached an oval hollow at the base of the tree that looked like it would accept their tribute with aplomb. She said nothing as she turned the first fistful of earth, but she spared a grateful look to Varric when the dwarf fell to the same task beside her; neither spoke, but they worked in concord, while the rest of the party spread out behind them.

The former Grand Enchanter, Fiona, stood off to one side, and Solas came abreast with her while the human and the dwarf deepened the hole. Sera accounted for the final member of the procession, taking her place a respectful distance from Bethany and Leliana, who remained at Suredat-an's flanks. Finally, when the hole was deep enough, Cassandra and Varric retreated from the ancient tree's roots, their faces smeared with old blood and fresh earth. Suredat-an stepped deliberatively forward, placing the charge in her care into the bosom of the earth with great reverence.

The elf who lay there seemed only to slumber, and to do so utterly serenely. Her face was full, her body pristine, unmarred by the bite of blade or the kiss of flame that it had faced all too often while she drew breath. The final ritual that had pitilessly sacrificed the full might of the Grey Wardens had restored her to perfection, washing away the terrible topography with which the previous decade had burdened her flesh, showing her and those gathered the sort of woman she might have become, had she not been taken by a lower calling. That ritual, the great sacrifice which had been her most audacious design, had taken place just the previous evening. Yesterday, she had arguably been the most powerful singular force in the history of Thedas, a warrior and warlord at the head of a venerated and formidable army that might have carved her an empire, had she but the will for such a thing.

Today, that army was gone, its soldiers naught but corpses whose blood had served to prepare her for the end of her own journey.

Today she was Athadra Surana, free and at peace.

Leliana stepped forward, surveying the remains of her former companion, the woman she had known since the opening days of the Fifth Blight. She did not speak, but after a handful of moments, she drew a deep breath. There, in the forest, for the first time in years, the former Orlesian bard began to sing.

"_Oh, Grey Warden_

_What have you done?_

_The oath you have taken is at last broken_

_All is undone; demons have come_

_To destroy this peace we have had for so long…"_

No one else made a sound as the woman's haunting voice filled the air around them, but the air rustled through the trees, lending a subtle susurrus as the song's accompaniment.

"_Ally or foe? Maker only knows_

_Ally or foe, the Maker only knows…_

"_The stronghold lives on, and the army's reborn_

_Compelled to forge on-what will we become?_

_Can you be forgiven when the cold grave has come?_

_Will you have won, or will battle rage on?_

"_Oh, Grey Warden_

_What have you done?_

_The oath you have taken is at last broken_

_All is undone; ash in the Sun_

_Cast into darkness, the light we had won…_

"_Ally or foe? Maker only knows_

_Ally or foe, the Maker only knows…_

"_The stronghold lives on, and the army's reborn_

_Compelled to march on—what will we become?_

_Can you be forgiven, when the cold grave has come?_

_Will you have won, or will battle rage on?"_

The bard finished with a long, mournful note. Those gathered to inter the Grey Warden did not weep; they were none of them the type, and she had not entered their hearts to leave them hollow at her departure; the two or three people for whom that might be true were far away from this place, and indeed might never even find it, should they be moved to make the attempt. They would have to discover their own ways of putting her memory to rest, when the time came. Yet those gathered around Athadra's final resting place stood witness to her sacrifice, each having been an instrument of her will; some few of them had even been her confidantes, by degrees, in the last days and years of her life.

They would have to be enough.

Leliana retreated, and Suredat-an raised a naked hand; the turned earth around Athadra's grave shifted, slowly, coaxed to fill the hole as though by a gentle breeze. When at last it made a mound, Solas used his own arcane talents to pull stones from the ground around them, until they piled heavy and high in the cradle of the great tree's roots. He sewed subtle magicks into the stone and earth and the tree which sheltered it, making certain that it would not be disturbed by man or beast until the woman beneath had been subsumed into the soil and forgotten to time.

He was the first to turn from the cairn, to stalk into the forest's gathering gloam. Sera was not long in following, and then Fiona, and then Varric. Cassandra, Bethany, Suredat-an, and Leliana lingered for another handful of moments, the last a witness to Athadra's rise to power, the first a witness to her fall. And then, seemingly as one, they too turned, to head back to the thinner trees that formed the battlefield which Athadra had chosen to make her last.

In the last, failing light of evening, the sky was dimmed further by silken strands driven off the battlefield as it was purged of corruption. The great dragon, Lusacan, whom the Tevinter Imperium exalted as the Dragon of Night, who had been worshipped as a living god and fire made flesh for eons beyond the counting, lay burning upon the field, its flesh turning irreversibly to fire, and thence to ash.

A few whispers of this ash flitted fitfully about the cairn, caught in spindles by the breeze and the ancient magic that kept a single speck from touching the stones, destined to float forever above the woman who had given her life to bring the ash into being; the woman who now rested peacefully beneath them.

_Ally or foe? Maker only knows_

_Ally or foe, the Maker only knows_

_Will you have won, or will battle rage on…?_


End file.
